Re: Unmet Deps revisted
On Wed, Jan 13, 1999 at 02:55:50PM +0100, Santiago Vila wrote:
> What happens is a complete disaster. Examples:
>
> smail is still optional, but conflicts with exim, so it should be extra.
Why? I can understand why sendmail for example is in extra, it's a
scarey program and unless you know what you're doing you should probably
not use it. But how do other MTAs fit a similar description?
> hello-debhelper conflicts with hello, and has absolutely no extra
> functionality over ordinary hello, so the binary should be removed, in
> either case it should be extra.
Again, WHY? hello and hello-debhelper are only there to show you how a
package is built. It provides the extra functionability of being built
with debhelper.
> gmc conflicts with mc, but both are optional.
Once again, why is this a problem? When there was mutt and mutt-i both
were optional. They conflicted and replaced eachother. Are you saying
this was wrong behavior in general? Conflicts and dependancies are what
make Debian better than dists like slackware. You cannot seriously
expect to be able to make every single optional package install because
there are just too many programs that exist and do the same exact thing.
What you're asking us to do is to decide for the users which programs are
the best when there is a case where two programs serve the same purpose
but cannot serve that purpose at the same time.
This is IMO unreasonable. There may be a good reason for it to be as you
suggest, but just doing it so the user can "install everything" is not a
good reason. If I'm missing something here please feel free to correct
me on this; I simply do not see an issue here.
> There are in total *ten* dselect Dependency/conflict resolution screens.
> (using the PageForward key). Am I *really* required to report them *all*,
> or may I ask our kind ftp.debian.org maintainers to do a *serious*
> dependency/conflict check *before* the deep freeze?
You had to go through a lot of work to bring up this situation in the
first place. I think you more or less got what you asked for in this
case.
I'm also convinced some of these problems are outstanding dselect bugs.
--
"Lennier, get us the hell out of here!"
"initiating 'getting us the hell out of here' maneuver."
-- Babylon 5
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